“Amadeus”

Just back from a superb Utah Shakespeare Festival production of Sir Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus.

David Ivers, one of the two artistic directors of the Festival and a perennial audience favorite here, was powerful as Salieri.  Tasso Feldman was surprisingly affecting to me as Mozart, given the fact that I’ve never liked the play’s portrayal of the composer.  We had seats front row and center (for the first time), and being up close gave us an excellent vantage point from which to observe the details of his acting.

I don’t know how accurate Amadeus is, historically speaking.  Not very, is my suspicion.  I doubt that Mozart, who had been raised at aristocratic courts from the time he was a tiny child, was the crude and socially inept buffoon that the play presents.  Maybe he was, though.  More importantly, Salieri and Mozart evidently got on pretty well together, in real life.  Salieri helped to further Mozart’s Figaro, for example, composed a (now lost) cantata with him, etc.

So Amadeus might be a real disservice to Salieri, a posthumous act of theatrical character assassination.  Shaffer, who is very nearly ninety, may owe Salieri a deep, heartfelt apology.

But, granted the story of the play itself, it’s a remarkable exploration of jealousy, of unequally distributed natural gifts, of the mentality of bargaining with God, of tragic human limitations.  A rich and provocative piece of drama.  There are elements in it that remind me of issues raised by Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and others that, to me, recall the question posed to God in Malachi 3:

 13 Your words have been stout against me, saith theLord. Yet ye say, What have we spoken so much against thee?

 14 Ye have said, It is vain to serve God: and what profit is it that we have kept his ordinance, and that we have walked mournfully before the Lord of hosts?

 15 And now we call the proud happy; yea, they that work wickedness are set up; yea, they that tempt God are even delivered.

Of course, Amadeus doesn’t contain the answer given, according to Malachi, by the Lord:

 16 ¶Then they that feared the Lord spake often one to another: and the Lord hearkened, and heard it, and a bookof remembrance was written before him for them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name.

 17 And they shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels; and I will spare them, as a man spareth his own son that serveth him.

 18 Then shall ye return, and discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth him not.